Drawing on the artist’s research and travels in Nepal and Japan, in The Color of Place, Teresa Cole brings together several installations for her sixth solo exhibition at Callan Contemporary. Cole explores the sculptural dimensions of paper as a surface and substrate, displaying the weight and texture of the printed material. In this body of work, the artist prints on Japanese paper (washi) that has been dyed, cut, rolled, and layered to create undulating forms that mimic the movement of fabric, alternatively evoking bolts of cloth, tents, Buddhist monks’ robes, and prayer flags. Cole states, “From exploring new worlds, color has seeped into my forms like the dye absorbed by the paper.”
Currently the Maxine and Ford Graham Chair in Fine Art at Tulane University, Cole earned a B.F.A. degree from Maryland Institute College of Art and an M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art, before continuing her studies as a member of Peacock Printmakers in Aberdeen, Scotland. Examples of her work can be found in a number of important institutional, private, and corporate collections, including The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (Australia), The Museums of the University of Richmond (Virginia),The New Orleans Museum of Art, The Weisman Art Museum (Minnesota), JP Morgan Art Collection (New York), AB Freeman School of Business, Tulane University, Four Seasons Hotel (New Orleans), among others.
She has attended prestigious residences at Hard Ground Printmakers, Cape Town, South Africa; Frans Masereel Graphics Center in Kasterlee, Belgium; and Khoj Kolkata, West Bengal, India, and served as the Tulane University Lurcy Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
In each work exhibited in The Color of Place, Cole contrasts and juxtaposes geometric and organic shapes rendered in a range of tonal values, where diffused, translucent forms alternate with crisply defined lines and ornamental tendrils. In Madder 2.0 and Saturate 2.0, densely patterned surfaces of red or blues are fashioned into columns of variable width, produced by looping richly dyed printed papers around bamboo structures. In her Transpositions series, printed surfaces are held taut between flat pieces of bamboo, layered atop one another in arrangements resembling the architectural form of doorways or gates. Using fabric dyes as well as inks, these works impart the tactile impression of sumptuous textiles.
In their materials and techniques, these pieces also respond to the artist’s own experience of the particularities of place. This is acutely clear in Saffron, created in response to the devastating April 2015 Nepalese earthquake. In the artist’s words, Cole’s memorial, in both form and function, is “like a prayer in the wind.”
by Stephanie Porras